


Veins In My Wires

by ThisCatIsCreepy



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Emetophobia, F/M, Temporary Character Death, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Emotional Tension, but like. painkillers, no betas we die like the mechs, noone actually v-mits but still, self-negligence, that sure is a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:01:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27315916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCatIsCreepy/pseuds/ThisCatIsCreepy
Summary: Marius lets Raphaella cut open his arm to figure out the workings of his mechanisms, and it goes wrong.
Relationships: Raphaella la Cognizi/Marius von Raum
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	Veins In My Wires

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!  
> It's my first fic, well, ever, so feel free to say whatever. It was origianlly something else but then in grew into, this. Maybe I'll revisit the original idea.  
> Also, tell me if any additional tags are needed I have to goddamn clue how to tag here.

Raphaella la Cognizi leans over a kitchen counter as she attentively watches Marius fillet some brightly colored fish with large fins. The man may not be a surgeon but she's sure the baron's hand wouldn't hesitate when pulling out some poor soul's still beating heart out of their chest. The one hand that's now replaced with an intricate, devilish device.

"You know, I still haven't had a proper look at your mechanism", the science officer says, entranced by the precise movements of Marius' metal hand. Raphaella isn't really sure what she's looking for with these experiments. In part, she legitimately wants to learn how the crew's immortality ticks; in part, she wants to appreciate the craft of these beautiful, eternal machines of wire and blood; and in part, she just likes to cut people open.

"Sure, just clean up afterwards", Marius chuckles, skipping parts of the conversation that would lead to this answer.

Without missing a beat, Raphaella pulls out a folding scalpel and gracefully jumps over the counter. It's hard to tell whether the woman is serious in her pursuit of science or just messing around, less so when she charges you, wings wide open, with a cutting implement in hand. So Marius, for the lack of a better word, scatters, still holding the knife he was cutting the fish with.

He wanders the general vicinity of the kitchen for a bit, ready to defend himself if necessary. It's not that the baron opposes being a test subject, far from it, he has willingly participated in many of Raphaella's gruesome experiments - he likes seeing her have fun.

It's just the matter of operating on his arm.

Now, Marius is quite used to the gore and viscera that comes with being one of The Mechanisms, but he hates, _hates_ , when anything bloody happens to arms, hands, fingers, _wrists_ especially. Whether he sees it in front of him or in a movie, he just can't stomach looking at it, turning away and pressing his own hands against his body defensively. And so he can't imagine feeling his own arm being cut open and pulled apart without feeling uneasy.

Besides, he's hungry.

After waiting for about 10 minutes Marius returns to the kitchen to see two octokittens viciously devouring the fish he was preparing. Fuck. He was actually looking forward to this one. He's heard the taste of the thing is transcendent. Oh well, there's plenty of fish in the endless cosmos, or however the saying goes.

The baron briefly worries that he might have hurt Raphaella's feelings by running away like that, but, knowing her, she probably just shrugged it off and returned to her lab. Still, he should get on the operating table at some point. Maybe when he's astonishingly bored.

***

Marius is astonishingly bored.

It's been several centuries since the last planet, and will be several more until The Aurora reaches another one. It that time, the baron has already reaped every distraction the ship and the crew have to offer: he's cooked every dish he could with the supplies at hand - though not all of them were edible, - he's played every tabletop game the collective mind of The Mechanisms could come up with - though most of them ended up in a shootout, - and he's read every book in Ivy's library - though he didn't absorb a single word from those tomes aside from that one flower encyclopedia where "perfect" flowers were also called "bisexual". All in all, Marius has had every bit of fun he could.

And so he finds himself in Raphaella's lab, laid out on an operating table, shirtless, doped up on pain killers of her own formula, while the science officer straps his mechanized arm to the metal table with two leather belts. The baron isn't really comfortable without a shirt but he really doesn't want to get blood on it - he knows he'll forget to clean it until it becomes unwearable - so he just rests his free arm on his chest in a futile attempt to cover himself.

After dealing with the belts, Raphaella sets up her research equipment: a camera for later examination, a tablet for notes - writing on paper with a bloody hand isn't optimal - and, of course, a wide array of surgical tools. While she's positioning the camera to have a clear view whilst not getting in the way, Marius looks at his stretched out arm - the operation hasn't even started, and he's already filled with dread at the hopeless sight. But maybe the drugs amplify it a little bit.

"Ready?”, the science office asks gleefully, rearranging her tools.

The baron nods shakily, but thinks that he should provide a bit more of an answer, so he mutters a "yeah" and turns his head away from the woman.

He is fully prepared for the aching sensation of being cut, and so he jumps when Raphaella's hand touches the inside of his elbow, trying to feel something under the skin. She hums at whatever conclusion she arrives to and pulls her hand away to write something.

And finally, after a few moments, Marius feels the cold metal break his skin and the hot blood drip down his arm, managing its way into his armpit, making him shudder at the unpleasant sensation. He briefly looks down his body to make sure he didn't put on his white pants - though it's not like he can do anything about it if he did.

Raphaella cuts right where the mechanism meets the skin and slides the scalpel along the length of the arm. She then makes small cuts at the ends of the line so that she can peel the skin and have a proper look at the muscles. The feeling is unpleasant, to say the least. Like undoing old, blood drenched bandages, but instead dried blood, it's your own fat and muscle and sinews wanting to stick to the skin.

Marius feels the muscles in his arm spasm, but doesn't pay much attention to it, thinking it's just the reaction to being exposed. Then he starts hearing the sound of metallic rattle.

"Are you doing this?", Raphaella asks, looking at the shaking mechanical arm. The baron shakes his head. "Fascinating", the man can hear her smile as she whispers. Slight worry settles in his chest.

The science officer proceeds working on Marius' arm, carefully removing muscle and examining how the machine blends into flesh. And the arm continues to struggle at its bonds, now scraping against the table in a way that makes baron's drugged head hurt. He's fascinated at the woman's ability to be so precise with her dissection even as the subject is writhing and spasming under her knife, but he supposes centuries of operating on unwilling victims give you that.

He also briefly thinks that two leather belts might not be enough to contain the raging mechanism.

When Raphaella once again pulls her hand away from the arm to write more notes, the bonds break with a loud snap, making Marius finally turn his head to his right in fear and worry. His drugged mind catches nothing but his mechanism seizing the woman's wrist and crushing it with the most sickening sound, leaving her hand a mess of disjointed fingers. As Raphaella screams in shock and pain, the man can only look away, covering his face and trying not to throw up. The horrific scream echoes in his spinning head for what feels like hours before his mind goes blank.

He wakes up to a headache, on the same operating table, in his own blood and brain matter. As Marius brings his right arm to his ringing head, he sees the fully healed skin and remembers what happened. He looks around for Raphaella, almost falling off the table, and spots her at her desk, attentively watching the recording and taking notes with her left hand, the right one obscured by her body.

"Raph", he calls out breathlessly, she turns her head, "I'm sorry", he continues, tears swelling in his eyes, "I'm so fucking sorry, I didn't know it would launch for you like that, I-I thought the belts might break, I wanted to warn you but-"

"Oh, don't apologize, it was a valuable research!", she interrupts, grinning as if nothing happened, "It seems it was quite a literal defense mechanism in case of separation. It's fascinating! You're the only one with such a feature - Brian's body just turns to lifeless lump of metal once the heart is disconnected, and others, well, others just have mechanized organs", she elaborates, her smile showing canines. Marius is baffled at her response and wants to apologize further, but can't find the right words before she concludes "we should account for that the next time".

And so he's left a crying mess with nothing to say. He mumbles an "okay" and gets up from the table to get his shirt. The baron briefly assesses his bloodied state and decides not to put it on for now. As he stands at the door out of Raphaella's lab, he glances at her one last time, catching a glimpse of the now blackened, tangled fingers of her right hand, and quickly turns away, feeling something rise up his throat.

Marius stumbles down the corridor, still light-headed from death and drugs, but luckily arrives to his room without anyone seeing him. He heads straight to the bathroom. He breathes slowly above the toilet, head ringing, and ready to vomit, but as he gags, nothing comes out, which in the moment he finds annoying. The man then takes a long shower to wash off his blood and brains, and to think about what happened.

Marius knows his mechanism to sometimes act up. It stops obeying the brain and just flails around trying to grasp something - his clothes, his other arm, his neck - but the grip is never hard enough to cause any real damage. And so the way it hurt Raphaella is legitimately surprising and upsetting to him.

Is she really okay with him returning to her lab after that? After that gruesome scene? After the way she screamed? He knows it won't matter in a few hours but he still feels like absolute shit for putting her through that. He should make up for it.

***

A few days later Marius is at Raphaella's lab. He's holding two containers with the best meals he could cook with the supplies left, and a small potted plant for her to cross-breed with some mutated flowers of her own. Feeling like a high-schooler about to ask his crush out on prom, the baron knocks on the door and comes in.

"Marius!", the science officer calls out with a smile. She's working on some complex looking diagrams, but gets up with her tablet and flutters to the man. "I'm glad you're here, I looked a bit more into the footage, and-", she stops her train of thought when she notices the items in Marius' hands.

"It's, uh...", he stutters, suddenly forgetting how he wanted to word the sentence. "I'm sorry about your hand", is what he comes up with, handing Raphaella his gifts.

"Oh", her expression is difficult to read, "thank you", she takes them with tenderness that makes the man's ears burn.

Raphaella puts the meals on her desk and the plant next to some others in the back of the lab. Seeing Marius still standing in the same spot, she gestures for him to come in. He does, taking a seat at the desk, and she joins him after getting forks for them. The baron wants to ask her for something to drink, but gets cut off by the sound of the container lid being cracked open.

"You came at the right time, I've been _starving_ here for weeks", she says.

"You know you can always come down by the kitchen, right?", Marius forces a chuckle.

"Oh, but how could I when there is _science_ to attend to?", Raphaella refutes with a mad gleam in her eyes.

"Just eat already", he smiles with some sad fondness.

Marius doesn't eat that fast - some weird heaviness in his chest weakens his appetite - but he still finishes his meal before the science officer has even eaten a third of her portion. Every few bites she lays down the fork, picks up her tablet and starts talking about whatever she's discovered about baron's mechanism since their last meeting, drawing diagrams in the air and sometimes taking man's arm to point to specific parts, which always makes his heart skip a beat.

Marius loves seeing Raphaella like this - enthusiastically monologuing about her experiments and theories and just fucked up science in general. The way her eyes light up, and her smile brightens her face, and her wings flap idly - it really is beautiful.

And he wishes he could focus on all of that right now.

Instead the man notices her eyes struggling to stay open, her hands shaking slightly, her grip barely enough to hold the fork. She also twists her right wrist in a weird way - though maybe he's just never noticed it before - which makes him clench his jaw.

Marius knows that it doesn't matter, that they're immortal and can go without sleep, food, or water with no consequences. And yet he still wants to shake Raphaella by her shoulders and tell her to look after herself, that she is so, so much more than this lab and whatever madness she deems science.

But he knows the woman will just scoff at him with a difficult look and say, again, that it doesn't matter, that that's the point of being immortal - going places the universe doesn't want them to.

"Why do you even care?", she would ask, smiling.

And that, Marius wouldn't be able to answer. He isn't eloquent, less so when his face is burning and his brain is struggling to find any words to say that he wants her to be easier on herself, that he values her well-being, that she matters to him.

That he loves her.

And so he just listens to the woman explain things far beyond his nonexistent expertise and hopes that she'll at least think twice before throwing herself into a black hole.

At last, Raphaella finishes her meal and takes the containers, saying that she'll need them later - and by that she means she'll drop some radioactive liquid onto the leftovers to see what fungus will grow out of it. She thanks Marius for coming, hugging him with one arm, and goes back to work.

The baron spends a second too long at the door looking back at the woman, and leaves.


End file.
